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I have worked in the gaming industry and let me tell you that in some game studios most of the people involved in making the games are not gamers themselves.
Lots of programmers and artists don't really care about the final game, they only care about their little part.
Game designers and UX designers are often clueless and lacking in gaming experience. Some of the mistakes they make could be avoided by asking literaly anyone who play games.
Investors and publishers often know very little to almost nothing about gameplay and technology and will rely purely on aesthetic and story.
You have entire games being made top to bottom where not a single employee gave a fuck, from the executives to the programmers. Those games are made by checking a serie of checkboses on a plan and shipped asap.
This is why you have some indie devs kicking big studio butts with sometime less than 1% the ressources.
Afaik even in other "similar" industry (e.g filmmaking) you expect the director, producers and distributors to have a decent level of knowledge of the challenges of making a movie. In the video game industry everyone seems a bit clueless, and risk is mitigated by hiring large teams, and by shipping lots of games quickly.
I'm not sure what kind of role you had in the industry, but I'm not sure what you're saying is entirely accurate... although there are some bits in there I agree with:
Accurate. And that's ok. A programmer whose job it is to optimize the physics of bullet ricochet against thirteen different kind of materials can go really deep on that, and they don't need to (or have time to) zoom out and care about the entire game. That's fine. They have a job that is often highly specialized, has been given to them by production and they have to deliver on time and at quality. Why is that a problem? You use the corrolary of film, and nobody cares if the gaffer understands the subtext of the Act 3 arc.... it's not their job.
Which one? A game designer lacking in gaming experience likely wouldn't get hired anywhere that has an ounce of standard. A UX designer without gaming experience might get hired, but UX is about communication, intuition and flow. A UX designer who worked on surgical software tooling could still be an effective member of a game dev team if their fundamentals are strong.
Again, which one? Investors probably don't know much about the specifics of gameplay or game design because they don't need to, they need to understand ROI, a studio's ability to deliver on time, at budget and quality, and the likely total obtainable market based on genre and fit.
Publishers -- depending on whether you are talking about mobile or console/box model -- will usually be intimately familiar with how to position a product for market, what KPIs (key performance indicators) to target and how to optimize within the available budget.
This has happened. I'm not sure it's an actual trend. There are lots of misses in the game industry. Making successful products is hard -- it's hard at the indie level, it's hard at the AAA level. I would estimate there are a thousand failed Indies for every one you call out as 'kicking a big studio's butt.' Lots of failed AAA titles too. It's just how it goes.
The same, by the way, is true of film, TV, books and music. A lot of misses go into making a hit. Cultural products are hard to make, and nobody has the formula for success. Most teams try, fail, then try again. Sometimes, they succeed.
A lot of the same things you mention about game development are also apparent in open source software which is why it is usually so terrible. Someone that can program some complicated visuals for a 3D modeling program does not mean that same person actually does 3D modeling, which is why the interface for so many open source programs are abysmal.
I have a friend who has been coding various things for years and they are never successful because he builds interfaces he understands how to use. No one else does things his way.
Yup! That right there. You give a technical person a job that requires some level of "soft skills" and that is what you get.
This is probably true of many many other industries. I work in automotive and while a lot of us care about delivering a quality product, the majority are not "car people" and have never changed a part on their car.
Yeah, it is kind of the default isn't it. It kinda make sense for the programmers and artists, but it is still kinda weird that the actual designers don't really understand why people play video games. You wouldn't expect a movie director to not like movies, or a car designer to not like cars. I guess it must be happening everywhere at least to some degree.
Nowadays I would compare some game studios to what some boys bands were to music. You start with some guys with money who are neither musicians, nor sound engineers, nor anything really. They pick singers and musicians based on look and market research, they hire a large team of specialized workers, and then they spend millions on marketing to flood the space with their new album. The indie developers in this scenario would be Pink Floyd.
It wasn't always like this, at least for video games. I feel like in the 80s up to the early 00s it was mostly dominated by passionate workers, but there just isn't enough passionate workers for the demand. As the industry grew, big players started building those "soulless" projects to make good return on investment. Not to denigrate the individual contributions of the workers, but sadly the people who own those business don't really care if they're making games or cars or selling cigarettes. They care about r.o.i.